Matt Walsh has built his reputation on provocation. He often stirs controversy with blunt rhetoric and sharp-edged hot takes. But every so often, he cuts through the noise and hits on something so central, so undeniable, that it deserves to be spotlighted apart from any outrage it may generate. His recent post about the nature of "rights" is one of those times.
Yes, Walsh has a penchant for hyperbole. Yes, he stokes fires, leans into his cantankerous persona, and thrives on being the burr under the cultural saddle. But all of us, even those most turned off by his delivery style, need to wrestle with the actual argument he's making here because this is not just a hot take, it's a foundational truth: without God, there ultimately is no such thing as human "rights."
It's not an overly difficult deduction to trace: if "rights" aren't endowed by a transcendent Creator, then where would we derive them? From those in power? Those, like the mass-murdering Chinese dictator Mao Zedong, who boasted that "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun?" In that case, to Walsh's point, they are anything but "inalienable." They're simply permissions granted by whoever's in charge at the moment.
In other words, the moment it becomes politically advantageous to do so, those "rights" will be instantly revoked. There are countless blood-stained pages of history to offer evidence of what happens when governments become the source of rights.
To be sure, Walsh's position is not without its challengers. Many quickly object, insisting, "We don't need God for rights! We can ground them in reason, in human dignity, in the social contract, or in the mutual agreements of society." It sounds noble. It sounds sophisticated. It also collapses under the weight of about three seconds of thought.
Reason, after all, is not some unimpeachable authority. Whose reason are we talking about, after all? Jefferson's? Stalin's? The Supreme Court's? It's true, of course, that "reason" has been used to justify liberty. It's also true that it has been used to justify genocide.
And human dignity is an empty concept if you can't define what makes humans inherently dignified. If we're just a cosmic accident, just evolved stardust, there is no objective reason why your dignity matters more than the worm writhing in the dirt.
Equally tenuous is building your notion of human rights on any so-called ‘social contract.' At best, that's just the majority agreeing on what they like at a given moment. Those are trends, which means what you're calling "rights" are at best a temporary allowance until the winds of pop culture shift.
That's why though Walsh may be brash, he's also right. And it's why his argument deserves serious reflection. Erase God from the equation, and the premise of human rights becomes illogical and unsustainable. Instead, we are left with permissions from those who wield raw power. They will decide what we may or may not do, and they'll change their mind when it suits them.
That's not liberty. That's slavery with better PR.
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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Not the Bee or any of its affiliates.
